it starts with tomatoes

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to speak at an online conference on holistic approaches to mental health.

My topic was essentially sharing my story around how getting my Ancestry DNA report done, learning in detail where my blood and bones are from, had an unexpected impact on my feeling of being rooted and therefore contributing to a stronger feeling of resilience within myself.

Once I started speaking it became a sort of weaving together a few elements and experiences that I hadn’t realised were related until that moment… and I ended it with ‘maybe it all starts with tomatoes”.

Let me explain… when Covid-19 exploded into our world earlier this year, I got serious about growing my own food. Recently, I’ve been having a particularly lovely experience with a wild seeded tomato plant. The feeling of tending and nurturing and harvesting and washing and slicing and eating the shiny red gifts from this plant is one of deep gratitude for the reciprocal relationship between humans and the earth that I haven’t experienced before now.

My experience was heightened since I was also reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer at the time. Early in the book, she talks about her experience of the Indigenous approach to appreciating when there is bounty in nature and accepting when there is not. The example she gives is pecans. Apparently, pecan trees produce an abundance of nuts some years and none in other years without an obvious rhythm.

In the time of her grandfather, when there was plenty there was celebration, feasting, and preserving for the coming year and when there was not, there was acceptance.

It made me make a promise to myself to eat tomatoes when they are growing in the region where I live and not go into a store to buy them out of season when they've been transported in from other countries. Celebrate the tomatoes while they are here, miss them when they are not… which increases the gratitude and the celebration when they return.

All of that led me to see it as one of the small ways in which as a descendant of the colonisers, I have deeply ingrained assumptions about what I can have/take when I want it… and a clear recognition that it’s up to me to decolonise my mind.

Which led me to look at the ways I went seeking cultural rootedness where I had no business to do so. That journey will be its own blog post another time. 

For now, maybe it starts with tomatoes.